Discourse, the software that powers this forum, has an ActivityPub plugin, and we have it enabled here already.
This means that we can federate specific categories and tags of this forum with other forums. But (to me) more interestingly, we can federate with categories and tags of other ActivityPub-enabled forums (Discourse and NodeBB so far, and maybe more than forums, I’m still learning).
And this means that posts and replies with the federated category/forum will be replicated in both forums regardless of who has an account on which forum.
Therefore:
If you know of an ActivityPub-enabled forum that has (or could have) a specific category or tag that we could federate, reply here with the information.
Ongoing draft proposal
What is the point of federating?
To spread news
To receive feedback
NOT to federate just to federate
NOT to federate everything
NOT to have an equal discussion between TSMN and Fediverse posters (because it’s technically unfeasible)
I will document the instructions somewhere when I understand all this better. In the meantime:
To federate a topic, the federated-topics tag must be added. For now, and while we learn how this works, only mods can add this tag.
In the page for this tag, there is a "Federation " tab that shows the information to follow this ActivityPub actor (aka “Mastodon account”). It also shows followers and following.
It’s still there unfortunately. Can be seen from this thread:
Btw direct links to a federated post such as Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net immediately redirect to the forum. Not completely sure if I’ve seen Mastodon do this kind of thing before – expected to see the thread on mamot.fr
My first test was about publishing a new topic with federation instructions. In this case, there was already a topic created, which got traction and I thought it would be interesting to federate (because it contains information that I believe a lot of people on Mastodon has no idea about, including myself until I read it).
So what happens when you federate an existing topic with several replies?
Well, I got a bit confused at the beginning and I will need another test whenever there is another interesting topic to federate, but… it looks like as a moderator I could publish the posts one by one (maybe I could have posted all at once, I need to check again):
Not at all! Your points are valid, other people’s concerns are valid, federating is not a critical feature of this project, and we don’t need to rush.
Said that, I already skipped my own decision to federate Welcome Mel as TSMN admin! 🎉 – which is 100% justified and no regrets.
I am turning the top post into a wiki, to document what this ActivityPub plugin does and does not in plain words. Also to document our guidelines for moderators and administrators about when to federate posts and with what settings.
I can explain what I know in my evening, with time and mental peace. If anyone wants to start editing and/or compile questions, that would be great.
Also, we just upgraded discourse, and there were a bunch of updates to this plugin. Very nice to see that the Discourse team is working on it!
It all seems fun! But i’m a privy white dude with a very smol threat model. I think there is a major issue with the fact that the system will print followers only posts. Some people outside of the forum might think they answer to someone they recognize the name and avatar of, on a topic they’re interested in, do so in confidence, and have their stuff printed and indexed here.
I haven’t been able to read from the posts but if it exists or not, if there is no instance-level block i would just remove it and not look back until that’s a thing. Playing whackamole is only fun in very specific settings.
In my smol opinion, it should just not have been printed here. I don’t mind personally, but i can see how it could create a lot of problems. Beyond the fact that changing the privacy setting of a post tends to warrant fediblocks…
edit: to expand a bit, seen from microblogging patlforms i have tested (masto,misskey), it’s not evident that it is a public discussion happening in a completely different context. Changing privacy setting of posts in that setting is vowed to a jungle of problems. But hey, you can’t progress if you don’t try things!
No, peertube will simply not print the comment or notify the author if it is set to private. Pixelfed will only show it to followers and the mentioned people.
Ok, I understand, thank you. I wonder how the WordPress ActivityPub plugin handles these scenarios. For the Discourse team it might be helpful to see good cases of “hybrid” products in a ddition to the Fediverse-native ones.
If you (plural) want to draft a feature request for the plugin developers (the top post is wiki editable), then I can (or you can, as you prefer) submit it upstream (see other feature requests).
Meanwhile, if we want to mitigate this, we could just federate the top post and not the replies.
i agree that changing privacy setting of a “outside” reply/comment from followers-only to (effectively) public is a privacy issue that we should avoid. especially since there are no moderation tools wrt other instances in fedi. for the the time being it would be ethical to have only top posts federate (if,or when selected so), but replies are not federated back to the topic on this forum. this makes it muchless fun, but privacy and respect comes first.
a quick fix for the plugin to acknowledge this problem would be that only replies with privacy set to public should find their way back to the comments under the topic on the forum.
thanks @setto for spotting this important deficiency!
Thinking about all the feedback received, and considering that we are creating TSMN to help music makers and friends and not to debug and improve ActivityPub plugins , I suggest we federate only the top post for now, and all the problems raised will become moot.
When we are done Betatesting TSMN, we can come back to these settings, look if there has been any progress with the plugin, and change something or not, until the next checkpoint.
Please check the description and let us know if you agree with it or is there anything you would improve.
Not at all! Your points are valid, other people’s concerns are valid, federating is not a critical feature of this project, and we don’t need to rush.
)
. That’s cool!
, I suggest we federate only the top post for now, and all the problems raised will become moot.